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Damn, thought I found this nifty chunk of basalt out near Anza Borrego. It’s got a flat bottom (no jokes) and it is yet another rock I have on my desk for allegedly utilitarian purposes. This one, I told my wife, would make a great paperweight. But I just like rocks. I stood there in the ninety degree heat just west of the Salton Sea Basin, flowers in a zillion colors in every direction, fixated on the rock in my hand. I love basalt. I pictured it forming far below my feet, rising, cooling, a tiny bit of the earth’s mantle cooled and frozen into hard, simple stone. I was hoping it was a billion years old. I always hope basalt is a billion years old. It wasn’t. The basalt in the area was a mere hundred million years or so. Still, it does make a good paper weight, even if it’s a relative infant, mantle wise. There is something fundamental about basalt, a strength, a simple plainness, an assurance that our planet is solid and very real in the vast emptiness of the universe.

But a few minutes ago, eyes drifting from the TV where the LA Kings were being humiliated by yet another Canadian team, I started looking closely at my paper weight again. The lighter, granitic smears bothered me. Why were they there? And I hadn’t paid much attention to the bits of white on the surface. With the Kings collapsing in their own zone again, I grabbed a magnifying glass. It’s not a very good one, but through it I studied those white bits. Damn–structure. I screwed up my eyes and squeezed every bit of nearsighted vision I had remaining. Sure enough, there it was-a cylinder, ringed, tapering. Perhaps some sort of gastropod shell, some kind of pointy shelled snail maybe an inch long. I look carefully over the rock and see similar structure in some other bits. Shells. This is limestone. A very dark limestone. I took it into the kitchen and let water run over it. Wet, it’s nearly black. I found an article online about black limestone, and how to tell it from basalt. Basalt typically contains some larger non-basalt crystals. I pored over the surface of the rock again with the magnifying glass looking for crystals. Nothing. Just little hints of fossils. Bits of living things. This rock is made of organically produced structures that once contained soft bodied, skeletonless creatures, invertebrates. Organisms that needed the shelter of a shell they made themselves. Animals trying not to be eaten.

It dawned on me that I was holding in my hand the end result of the evolution of predators, of meat eaters, because before predation there was no need for shells. Everybody ate algae. There was need for shells or hard body parts or beaks or teeth. But I was holding those long deceased animals’ shells. A half billion years of protection against murder reduced to its basic minerals and a few whole bits and congealed together on the floor of the ocean after the animals shed or died in them, then pressed down by the weight of millions of years of sediments above, then hardened into rock, into this limestone. It’s like holding a handful of millions of untold histories.

The black color? I suppose it’s black the way some shales are black, shales of hardened darkened mud. I really don’t know. Basalt would have been so simple. Formed deep beneath us under the tectonic plates we stand on, and stretched out into ocean floors, then lifted up as the plates crunch into each other, pushed upward into mountains and then broken down again by water and wind and earthquakes, carried along by floods too many to count and left in the dirt at my feet between bunches of violet sand verbena and a few wild poppies. A simple story, basalt. Now I have instead a compacted chunk of the story of life, and I stare at the damn thing and feel hollow.

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My latest writing at: Brick Wahl

Was out on the moondeck around midnight and the silence was something. A solitary siren set off the coyotes and for a minute there I could have been in the middle of the Mojave, but the siren keened away and the coyotes shushed. A bat fluttered by. An owl flapped from one tree to another […]

This Canter’s Rueben ought to make up for all the vegetarian meals I usually eat. I suppose the pickle is the vegan part. And there’s enough oil in these onion rings for a whole weekend of orgies. Slippin’ and a slidin’, gotta wash my hands. The pickle just squirted all across the table, iPad, and […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

Found this in my drafts, completely forgotten. I only found it again when one of these bits–Walking About–wound up on a tee shirt in Australia. Seems I had once spent a late evening on YouTube digging up old tunes from my past life and writing about them. They’re not for the jazzbos, most of ’em, they’re […]

Staying in tonight, we’re going to see Chuck Manning at the York tomorrow. Been listening to ancient radio comedies all week. Amazing how weird and conceptual and hysterically funny this stuff was, TV comedy has rarely come close, and never gotten beyond it. The mind’s eye can visualize so much more than our meager real […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

Hoover flags, they called empty pockets in 1931, and they became emblematic of Herbert Hoover’s abject failure in dealing with the Great Depression. I suspect homemade face masks are becoming Trump’s Hoover Flags.

I admit it, I voted for Mike Bloomberg. I think it was the last one hundred mailings that won me over. Not that I read any of them. But there were so many it just had to be presidential. Liz Warren only sent a few, which I read. She had my vote for the first […]

My latest writing at: Brick's History

Finally saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last night. Maggie Smith, gorgeous locations, etc. It seemed a rather nothing story about an incredibly irritating Scottish teacher and her perfect little students. La creme de la creme she called them. She worshipped beauty, art, perfection, punctuality. It began to get more interesting. A few plot twists and […]

Interesting bit in The Third Man that few probably pick upon anymore…after Holley Martins (Joseph Cotten) first meets Baron Kurtz, they go walking down the sidewalk together. Kurtz has vaguely Mediterranean features and it dawned on me that the character might be Jewish. It had never occurred to me before because Austria had been thoroughly […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

That ephemeral sensation of newness is gone now. It lasts a day, maybe two, and then disappears like a morning fog. I’d never written about it before. If I hadn’t written about it I’d never even know about it, it’s so fleeting, no more permanent than a dream you can’t remember the details of an […]

After a dozen hours of sleep the brain has settled down nicely. Realized I hadn’t been outta the house for a couple days and went to take down some bags to the bins and get the mail and I had this inexplicable trepidation. When I went outside it was like I’d never done it before. […]